Ruhiton Kurmi has been in jail for seven years. Once a notorious Naxalite – a militant leftist revolutionary – he is now a withered shell; a man broken by police torture, racked with fevers and sores. The only way he can endure his life is by shuttin...

Most discussions of India's First War of Independence from British colonial rule in 1857 have centered on the role played by the Mughal emperor, the nawab of Awadh, and other sundry members of mostly urban nobility. What has remained missing from thi...

In the southern Indian state of Kerala, Najeeb's dearest wish is to work in a Persian Gulf country and earn enough money to send some back home. One day, he finally achieves this dream, only to be propelled by a series of incidents – grim and absurd...

April 30, 1945, marked an end of sorts in the Third Reich. The last business day before a national holiday and then a series of transfers of power, April 30 was a day filled with contradictions and bewildering events that would forever define global...

Buddhism, love, Henry James, and the tango are just a few of the topics Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's master writer, and extraordinary conversationalist, discusses in the first volume of the remarkable new series, "Conversations".  The eighty-four-y...

In 1975, when political scientist Benedict Anderson reached Wat Phai Rong Wua, a massive temple complex in rural Thailand conceived by Buddhist monk Luang Phor Khom, he felt he had wandered into a demented Disneyland. One of the world's most bizarre...

A poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud was a visionary writer and a major influence within and beyond the French avant-garde. A key text for understanding his thought and his appeal, "50 Drawings to Murder Magi...

Laura Wilmote is a television journalist living in Paris. Her life couldn't be better – a stimulating job, a loving boyfriend, interesting friends – until her phone rings in the middle of one night. It is C., an old school friend whom Laura recently...

Swiss novelist Catherine Colomb is known as one of the most unusual and inventive francophone novelists of the twentieth century. Fascinated by the processes of memory and consciousness, she has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Prou...

When he was seven years old, Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan moved with his family to a Karameh refugee camp east of the River Jordan. That camp – a center of Palestinian resistance following the Six-Day War and the site of major devastation when Isr...